Talk:Modern Jewish historiography/Archives/2023/November

Yosef ha-Kohen

I added Yosef ha-Kohen (1496–1575) was a historian and physician of the 16th century. His is the first known work by a Jewish writer describing the history of non-Jews.

I see that "Jewish historiography" is somewhat ambiguous in terms of the grammatical construction since it could technically also mean histories of histories written by Jews, not simply of Jews. I also fundamentally think there are going to be Jewish aspects to this history. Most Jewish historians don't write a history "of Jews," they write a history of the world from a Jewish perspective. Isn't that also Jewish historiography? Andre🚐 22:20, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi Andrevan, thank you for bringing this here. I acknowledge your points re terminology – perhaps we need further work on the title, or the first line, to make the scope clear.

I subscribe broadly to @Levivich:’s forward editing approach, at least on topics where the key sources are very clear. The subject here, “modern history of histories of the Jews” has a surprisingly focused group of core sources, all of which are writing about exactly the same subject. They are summarized in the last paragraph of the article The study of modern Jewish histories began with Michael A. Meyer's "Ideas of Jewish History" (1974), developed further by Ismar Schorsch's "From Text to Context" (1994). These works emphasized the transformation of Jewish historical understanding in the modern era and are significant in summarizing the evolution of modern Jewish histories. According to Michael Brenner, these works – like Yerushalmi's before them – underlined the "break between a traditional Jewish understanding of history and its modern transformation".Michael Brenner's Prophets of the Past, first published in German in 2006, was described by Michael A. Meyer as "the first broadly conceived history of modern Jewish historiography".

I am keen to keep the scope focused on this topic. Perhaps there could be another early on “Early modern Jewish historians” to capture Yosef Ha-Kohen and many others? Onceinawhile (talk) 22:29, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough, but I don't subscribe to Levivich's approach; I subscribe to the iterative, incremental, never-finished, always-evolving, agile model. But it does strike me that there are going to be other authors that may have been overlooked by the work in 1974 or even 1994, given that Sephardic and Arab world scholarship was often overlooked in favor of Christian world scholarship. For example, Gedaliah ibn Yahya ben Joseph definitely wrote a history of Jews, though I'm not sure if he invalidates the current description of "the first author in the modern era to publish a comprehensive history of the Jews." So I'm looking to see if there are any newer secondary/tertiary sources for this. David Gans is mentioned as well. As well as Yosef ha-Cohen, they are mentioned as writing "Jewish annals" or "chronicles." Andre🚐 23:09, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

• What about this: [1] "Ẓemaḥ Dawid," published first at Prague, in 1592. It is divided into two parts, the first containing the annals of Jewish history, the second those of general history. The author consulted for the second part of his work the writings of Spangenberg, Laurentius Faustus, Hubertus Holtzius, Georg Cassino, and Martin Borisk. Though Gans's annals are very dry and have no great intrinsic value, they are memorable as the first work of this kind among the German Jews, who at that time appreciated historical knowledge but slightly. Indeed, in his preface to the second volume the author deemed it necessary to justify himself for having dealt with so profane a subject as the annals ofgeneral history, and endeavored to demonstrate that it was permitted to read history on Saturdays. The "Ẓemaḥ Dawid" passed through many editions. To the edition of Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1692, David ben Moses Rheindorf added a third part containing the annals of that century, which addition has been retained in later editions of the "Ẓemaḥ." The first part of Gans's work, and extracts from the second, were translated into Latin by Wilhelm Heinrich Vorst (Leyden, 1644). It was translated also into Judæo-German by Solomon Hanau (Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1692). Andre🚐 23:17, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

• "Some Jews courageously explored new roads. The most eloquent of these, who came close to a genuinely historical mode of writing by contemporary standards, were Eliya Capsali, Joseph ha-Cohen, and David Ganz. Guedalia Ibn Yahia may be added to their ranks, although not without some reservations. By adopting the methods of ecclesiastical history, they tried to do what Eusebius and his followers had done, yet in a different way. They assigned a place to Jewish history within the framework imposed by the literary genre of history as a narrative of political and military deeds....... I would certainly agree with most of Yerushalmi's remarks on this point: like Joseph ha-Cohen, all these writers indeed extended their range far beyond previously accepted boundaries; all assigned prominence to post-biblical Jewish history; all certainly showed much interest in non-Jewish history, especially the history of contemporary peoples.36" Andre🚐 07:25, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

• I added him back based on Abraham David and the Bonfil source above. I believe Yerushalmi mentions him too. Andre🚐 00:01, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

References

wikiprojects

I informed Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Jewish history and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Judaism of this page, since they seem active. Andre🚐 01:02, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

I did the same on 19 September. Onceinawhile (talk) 08:53, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

History of Jewish historiography

@Andrevan: you have done some excellent work here. I am so pleased to see it. Our collaboration didn’t get off to the easiest of starts, but it seems it has been well worth it for the benefit of the encyclopedia.

Reflecting on it, it is strange to think that this subject wasn’t covered anywhere in our project until we stumbled into the topic.

Anyway, one quick comment on the structure. I noticed we no longer have a section on the history of Jewish historiography. I think it is an important distinction – most of these scholars wrote histories. The latter names wrote historiographies, which is a different category. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:53, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. Yes, I agree it's a bit strange that there wasn't a single article pulling these threads together, but it's a bit of a "meta-topic." There are a number of articles on the various bits and pieces spread throughout many biographical articles, many of which come from some old public domain imports of the Jewish Encyclopedia and other similar sources from the early days of Wikipedia, so are due for revisiting in light of modern scholarship.

I actually think that these medieval and early 16th c. histories are analyzed as "works of historiography" if you look at how the difference sources refer to them, i.e. histories of history and analysis of historical sources. But I've been making a lot of big changes so let's catch up on them and discuss some of them, including the structure. It might make sense to separate the period starting with Yerushalmi into a separate section. I've added to a section called "Later 20th century: history of historiography", how's that? Andre🚐 21:58, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

That works well, thank you. The article is shaping up very well. Onceinawhile (talk) 23:12, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, so glad to hear it! Any thoughts you have and feedback are most welcome. Andre🚐 23:21, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Passing comment: this artcle indeed reads more like History of Jewish historiography (and I'd suggest renaming it to such title) rather than the comprehensive overview of "Modern Jewish historiography". For example, I don't see any part of the article which discusses the trends and views of modern Jewish historiography (I am somewhat familiar, for example, with the disagreemnts between Jewish and Polish historiographies - a topic that is not even alluded to in this article). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:05, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm not sure Onceawhile was suggesting the entire article be moved to that. That is mainly referring the latter section, though I agree, technically, this article could be called "history of Jewish historiograph(ies)" but, I'm not entirely sure what would be included in this article title that would be different from that one. Anyway, do you have some idea of the differences in Polish historiography that are worth mentioning here and what sources would be good to incorporate? I do have a few parts where Polish-Jewish historiography is quite relevant, particularly the source on the Podolian steppe stuff that I came across recently: Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands [2] Andre🚐 04:10, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

We don't have yet an article on Polish historiography either. The topic I mentioned is rather vast and somewhat controversial. For some sources, see this query. For a specific example, see Home_Army#Jews (middle of the first paragraph). I'd also expect that we would find other notable cases - for example, I expect intersection with Ukrainian historiography to be similarly different and controversial, if not more so (see query). And this is just from "my ballpark", I'd expect Jewish and Arab historiography to be even more diverging... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:11, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Andalusian Muslim and Arab historiography pre-1945 would be easy to write and few divergences or controversies with Jewish historiography. The Israel-Palestine conflict is a modern times phenomenon, as are the Shoah, Zionism, Palestinian/pan-Arab nationalism, etc. Jews and Muslims coexisted in the Old Yishuv for 100s of years. In most of recorded history, Jews and Muslims got along well and Sephardic Jewish writers trusted Averroes, ibn Khaldun, etc., who writes extensively and accepted Jewish history and presented it exceptionally[3] See Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, Social and cultural exchange in al-Andalus, etc. I agree that most historiography articles are red-links. As hopefully the work on this article shows, modern Jewish historiography really does start in the early modern and late medieval period, draws on a lot of European material from the Roman and Byzantine Empire, France, Spain, and later Italian citystates, and later a lot of Germany, UK and America (I'm researching the expulsion to resettlement UK period right now, and I have a few things I want to add). As far as Polish historiography during the interwar period, while I know it's controversial, I will confess it's not really my expertise or personal interest, but we certainly will need to flesh out the historiography of that period as I've been spending a lot more time on the Renaissance since it's more interesting and lesser-known. It's also kind of more exciting and not sad or tragic. But feel free to take a gander. We'll definitely have to add if not a new section, at least a few more paragraphs about WWII. Andre🚐 06:34, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Following up to this, I assumed when you were talking about controversial Polish historiography you meant WWII - but there was an episode that I wasn't really thinking of in the 1648-1653, which I've added to the article now Modern_Jewish_historiography#Hannover. Andre🚐 06:31, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Right, but the Chmielnicki Uprising is a good example for an influential earlier event that AFAIK is indeed differently described by those three historiograpies (four perhaps if you include Russian). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:26, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Which is essentially the text I've written into the article. Andre🚐 10:03, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

I think a sub-article on Historiography of the Holocaust would be a valuable addition to our encyclopaedia. A huge undertaking. Buidhe began part of it here: Historiography of the Holocaust in Slovakia.

On "History of Jewish historiography", that would be the second derivative of Jewish history. This article is intended to focus on the first derivative of Jewish history, albeit with a final section summarizing the second derivative. Onceinawhile (talk) 07:10, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure they can be fully treated separately - I feel like we are jumping back and forth between history and its reception, and the meta-commentary of scholars and references and reviews. I suppose a version can be rendered without any of the commentary on the history of the historians' views of history; or alternately, one could be written that shapes the change over time chronologically more directly. Anyway, what I'm finding is that someone like Yerushalmi had history that he wrote on the micro level, he also wrote historiographical studies that proposed a theory of understand for an entire era. For the more modern comprehensive texts they generally have their initial impact as well as the impact of the impact and revisions of the reviews. For older work it's even more complex, since there can be layers of echoes over thousands of years in some cases. Andre🚐 07:18, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Slowly catching up

Well, the pace of editing on the page by Andrevan has been quite overwhelming for me, and it will take me some time to catch up to it. But the work that has been done here so far is a great accomplishment, and I want to commend Andrevan for it. Kudos! Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 20:32, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

That's very kind of you to say :-) Andre🚐 03:12, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Fully agree with warshy. Onceinawhile (talk) 06:57, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I mean, the amount of RS refs added to this page by Andrevan in the past two weeks or so is substantial, impressive! For me, it will all take some time to digest... Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 21:47, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you both again. I must credit The Wikipedia Library's excellent JSTOR access. Andre🚐 22:01, 12 November 2023 (UTC)